


Sepulcher

by willowbilly



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Cultural Differences, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s01e10 We Are Gone, Gen, Ghosts, Graphic Description of Corpses, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Cannibalism, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Missing Scene, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-22
Updated: 2020-03-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:29:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23241775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowbilly/pseuds/willowbilly
Summary: Where Goodsir came from there is no permafrost, and soft, deep soil, for all those trees, those forests from which they craft their umiat, to flourish in. They fashion wooden coffins, and tear into the earth so as to inter their deceased in far-down graves, where none might innocently pick up a sun-bleached bone while thinking it to be that of an animal's, and then be required to whistlekukkukiaqfor having so intimately touched human death.Silna gives her friend a burial.
Relationships: Harry D. S. Goodsir & Lady Silence | Silna
Comments: 4
Kudos: 57
Collections: The Terror Bingo (2019)





	Sepulcher

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt "cultural differences"

Goodsir's dead flesh is cold and white under Silna's hand, and she flinches without meaning to upon first touching the shoulder of his corpse. Below the shoulder his upper arm has been carved away, leaving only empty space, the red meat dark and the bone even whiter than Goodsir's unnaturally bloodless complexion. Pink fingerprints blemish the edges where pieces of him are missing, and save for a tough strip of calloused skin sliced from the heel of one foot, the missing chunks are all meaty portions: The backs of the thighs, one buttock, the backs of both upper arms.

They have killed and eaten her friend.

She keeps her hand on Goodsir's shoulder, and she feels the absolute stillness of him, the heaviness which is the lack of breath or pulse. The wind moves the wavy tumble of his hair, and her own breathing moves her, sobs threatening to disrupt the silence which Silna has grown accustomed to holding whole in her chest. It takes several breaths to calm herself, though the grief, as much a part of her as the silence, does not lessen.

He looks so sad, lying there. Belly-down and with his head twisted to the side. So much smaller, without any garments, the pallid body having been flung bare and stark on the dark boards of exotic, precious wood, as stiff now in its abject objectification as though just another wooden plank, and on Goodsir's face there is an expression of loss as much as there is anything resembling peace. New and terrible woes have impressed themselves into him. His hair has become longer, his beard now covers his entire lower face, and the bleak sunlight picks out dark strands of gray she does not remember.

For an instant, as Silna had hauled Agluukkaq into the cannibals' abandoned camp and halted at first sight of the stripped and butchered human body, she'd not recognized it as him. Gone forever is the neat and kindly man with combed hair and pink cheeks who had been so full of wonder.

Silna must dress him, as she'd had to dress Agluukkaq's injuries, especially lest Goodsir have been modest to mortification. She's gathered a full set of a'nuraat from the tent which she assumes was his for this purpose.

There'd been a few of Harry Goodsir's healing tools and paraphernalia in that tent. A person's worth of blood was puddled and congealing to brown on the floor of the bed place within. Footprints from qablunaat boots had tracked the red everywhere, and Silna had stepped very carefully.

Her touch is far more careful yet upon Goodsir.

She'd not touched him much when he was alive, something she thinks of with regret now that she knows she'll never again feel him alive, and warm, and breathing. But there are those several occasions for which Silna is thankful of having had, for they distract her, slightly, from the present. From how rigid he is as she pulls the long white shirt onto him, his neck reluctant to bend as she gingerly slides her hand under his clammy, flattened cheek to lift his head, to work the shirt across his shoulders and down to where she can put his arms into the sleeves.

The insides of his wrists are slit open. The mortal wounds have been self-inflicted, gouged deep and ragged into himself. The bloodied pile of broken glass—an unmelting and transparent material forged from sand which these people use for their windows, rather than cutting igalaat out of freshwater lake ice in the autumn—had been kicked under Goodsir's bed. That would have been what he'd used.

When they had taken away all his other edges, he'd put to himself a knife of glass. Suicide.

This revelation inexplicably strikes her with the urge to weep all over again. Silna crumples over him for a moment as the grief peaks into physical pain.

She'd recognized the corpse as a cannibalized man, as having been carved up for consumption, before she'd recognized it as Goodsir. It is the same way now, as she recognizes the wounds and is appalled at the tragedy they represent before she can possibly begin to consider what reasons there might have been.

The subsequent realization, that of how much sheer _despair_ must have been forcibly instilled into Goodsir in order to break him so, pierces her heart all the sharper. Agluukkaq, their Crozier, she'd discovered in chains; had they stolen and chained Goodsir the same? Forced him to nurse them, forced him into toil and hopelessness.

It had been his own precious men of England who had done this. This, to him their own—and the _loathing_ Silna feels when she thinks on this is not befitting of any aŋatkuq who wishes not to be evil. But she had never been fit to be a shaman, and is not one now. She is only a mourning woman.

Biting her lip to remind herself to concentrate, Silna holds Goodsir's cold hand for a moment, squeezing as if in futile reassurance, and is then soon absorbed in fitting the flowing sleeves of his cotton shirt around the arms of his corpse, on obscene display upon the eating platform. A slab of meat made sacrifice, the excision of which pulses inconsolably within her.

She makes sure to fasten the cuffs properly so as to enfold each poor wrist from sight, and the shirt is good for this in that its cuffs and collar are much more snug and reinforced than the rest of the article, which is so loose and flimsy that the fabric even affords pleated sleeves, pretty things sewn into the drooping shoulder seams, holding though the cloth has worn to pilled with use.

When the shirt is finally on him all the way down past his thighs, she steps back, and watches the wind whip at his dark hair and billow the pale cloud of his airy cotton-cloth shirt, sky's breath filling the missing places of his mutilated body. Yet he remains and looks all that he is: A corpse. A small, sad corpse, bereft of life's animation.

Goodsir bled out surrounded by captors, and Silna had not even known, so as to wish for herself to have been there. To have held him, and to listen to the last of his breaths.

Looking at Goodsir for this long precipitates her tears and she sits down to cry them. They overflow from her eyes and course down her cheeks like spring rivers, yet eroding her with salt, until it is as if they, too, have carved into flesh, albeit this her own. Silna wipes them away then, when weeping begins to hurt too greatly. She gets up and trudges forward to finish this most simple of vital tasks, turning him over, struggling with numb fingers and all the unfamiliar buttons, the braces, the exact knot for the foreign black neckband tied around the collar, and, exhausted, she avoids any further study of Goodsir's visage as she attires him.

After this she ties a shroud around his body, being certain to cover his face, and she moves him back into his tent. For four days, a man's soul lingers beside his body, and for this period Silna only tends to Agluukkaq and observes the death taboo.

* * *

Silna departs from that wretched camp with Goodsir on her qamutiik and she takes him far away, until even the big hill above the place of the cannibals is a distant thing and there is finally some scant moss to soften the stony ground.

There, she picks a natural indentation in the land up on the crest of a low rise, and she lays Harry Goodsir down. She sweeps away the little rocks and pebbles so that none lie beneath to poke him, and makes sure that he faces the darkness, so his tarniq will remember to turn toward the light; cuts the thongs of the shroud so that he will be able to see this light when the sun next ascends. Were he one of theirs she would leave him laid out like this to return into the earth under the sky, for the Qikiqtarmiut do not bury their dead, but Silna remembers from her conversations with Goodsir that the British bury theirs.

Where Goodsir came from there is no permafrost, and soft, deep soil, for all those trees, those forests from which they craft their umiat, to flourish in. They fashion wooden coffins, and tear into the earth so as to inter their deceased in far-down graves, where none might innocently pick up a sun-bleached bone while thinking it to be that of an animal's, and then be required to whistle _kukkukiaq_ for having so intimately touched human death.

The ground here is too hard for Silna to dig the inuviniq a burial pit of such an extravagant sort, and might bring misfortune besides, but she can build a cairn around that which used to be a person as do such Inuit as those dwellers of Aivilik for their own inuviniit. They who had come long before to Qikiqtaq had left ruins on the island, and among them, along with their weirs and inukšuit and old campsites, are the crumbling remnants of stone graves. Silna has seen these grave cairns and knows well how to make one. It will be barely different from constructing a meat cache for natsiviniq, as she has done innumerable times before.

Goodsir is very different to her from a dead natsiq. The last time she had mourned a seal to this extent she had been a child making her first kill, safe with the hands of her ataata upon hers to guide her, Ataata there to hold and comfort her when she cried at the taking of life. Back when Anaana had lived, too. They had taught Silna how to provide. How death could still be life.

But there has been only death and more death for far too long.

Her father had not been granted the respect she will give to Goodsir, that which she wishes _had_ been—the tuurŋaq had first sought vengeance against the qablunaat for the indignities inflicted upon its aŋatkuq, lashing out with destruction the moment that its shaman had been shot and his control had slipped. So much might otherwise have been mitigated.

It had been after Silna already knew of Ataata's body having been stuffed down a hole to float in the frigid blackness beneath the winter pack ice, and after Agluukkaq's attempted interrogation of her aboard the umiaq _Terror,_ that Goodsir had told her of his witnessing them doing so. How they had jabbed at her father's flesh with their ice picks to ensure his immersion into the burning cold water.

Ensuring he'd sink to the depths wherein Nuliajuk is. To where the submarine forests, whence driftwood comes, once grew.

Silna had just lost her tongue, and the tuurŋaq, and when Goodsir had described this callous disposal to her, confessing so as to apologize, she could not look at him for the rest of that day. A feat made easy by her own exhaustion, and from whatever it was he'd given her to make her pain abate enough to sleep. Later, she found thankfulness in knowing of this through him. She was glad Goodsir was sorry; that he'd known it to be wrong, and that Goodsir was always so compelled into honesty simply by being around her.

She misses him with a bitterness which surprises herself.

With a metal-tipped digging stick taken from the camp for leverage, Silna rolls stones into a jumble near Goodsir's body, trying to transmute grief into action, into this one good act which she wants to do well for another person who was dear to her. As she selects and collects just the right rocks she keeps him within sight, but no more scavengers sneak up to feast from him while Silna does so. The largest stones, she fits together into a foundation around him.

In doing this she takes care that none of the rocks press in upon Goodsir. She takes care to make him comfortable.

When caching a catch of natsiit, or tuktuit, or iqaluit, Silna had always had help; alone, the biggest of the rocks which she selects are so, so heavy that she cannot lift them, and she strains with the effort of shifting them into place, of sculpting each place for every tooth of stone to be rooted in, every added lithic molar forming another spiraling part of a mouth without end.

Even incremental progress quickly saps her strength. The panels of qablunaat cloth with which Silna had repaired the shoulder and sleeve of her winter parka is as porous to the wind as any of those men's non-fur clothing, and as she labors the heat of her sweating body is at least somewhat cooled by the draft which seeps in. She pats the cold dirt and gravel into the fissures as she might snow between the building blocks of an iglu, heaping it up with the digging tool, packing it with her hands, and the earth builds beneath her fingernails.

The little boulders are set firm when this is done, and Goodsir lies sheltered inside on his back, in his greatcoat of frayed blue felt and tarnished metal buttons, his head still craned to put his chin alongside his shoulder and crooking the stiff white collar of his shirt askew.

The upraised side of his face sports that flat patch of lavender discoloration, the appearance of which Silna now tries to assuage by combing out his beard so that at least _it_ is not flat. The knot of the cravat that is wound around his collar still holds, but the wind must have made the ends come free from where Silna had tucked them into the waistcoat, from where they were before Goodsir was out of anirniq; they've fluttered to the side of his chest, and she sees thread straggling from a corner, the stitches torn.

Silna puts the cravat's ends back under and rearranges the neckband into fastidious prettiness, sliding her hand between smooth, cold layers of cloth, the protruding slats of Goodsir's ribs barely softened and no heat in his airless chest to warm his clothes from within as Silna's has.

Goodsir hadn't any hunting implements to bury him with, nor could Silna find a case of needles which he might have held as precious. The prospect of interring him alongside the broken glass with which he'd killed himself was repugnant to her, and so she had collected what other tools she'd recognized and known to be his, and she lays these things into the grave next to him.

She completes the construction soon from there, entombing him under a roof of stone until this sepulcher which she has built for him stands closed and perfect and Harry Goodsir rests safe within. It is in easy sight of the shore, and impossible to miss if one should be searching.

One day, those of his people who did hold love for Goodsir will find him, and take him home.

At the sunset of this day Silna rests with her back against the cairn, on the side out of the wind. And, just for a bit, she sits with him.

* * *

On the third night following Goodsir's burial she receives a visitation.

Though Silna is sleeping she senses the approach of the soul which comes to hover outside the flap of her tent, and in her sleep she recognizes it as Goodsir, and she reaches out her hand.

The shade steps through the flap without touching the canvas and coalesces from shadow into shape, until the tarniq appears as he would had his body been alive, and without mutilation, and well-nourished. Still with his beard full and curls long, and dressed in the clothes she'd put him into, all wavering in an unseen wind. His long coat sways and gutters, as blue as his cheeks are red, no blood at the roots of his hair and illusory health glowing from him like lamplight.

Goodsir hesitates, plaintive in his politeness there before where Silna has made her igliq, and she reaches her whole arm outside of her sleeping furs so as to beseech him with an invitation.

He folds down, drifting into place, into the bed beside her, and she blinks until his hazel eyes are clear, every eyelash and crease of skin, every pore and bristly hair true to life, and the darkness of the surroundings seeps into him until he seems almost solid, almost as though he is not merely a little light of his own which is without any substance unto itself; as if he has surfaces upon which darkness and light might meet. He has brought his wind with him, and it is as weightless and eerie as he, only a stillness pretending to be movement.

“What are you doing here?” Silna doesn't say, and as only a failed apprentice she hasn't a shaman's qaumaniq, but when the formation of this thought meets Goodsir's form within her perception it becomes him, and so he nevertheless hears that which she cannot speak, his head tilted as he listens.

With a breath of hers, borrowed, Goodsir's tarniq sighs to Silna that she had missed him, and with eagerness she inhales the stinging sweetness of the cold which he exhales; his last breath, every one.

“I'll not keep you from your rest,” she breathes back into him, a reservoir without depth, though had she been using her voice she thinks it would give out from how the self-recrimination tightens her throat. “Is there a prohibition pertaining to your death which I've broken? Is there some reason for your coming to me besides my missing you?”

“No,” says Goodsir, “no, all the wrongs which have been committed have been those of mine upon you, as ever, and as always, I would apologize to you for this.”

“You're dead, Harry. What grudges might I be so petty as to bear toward you, when it's you I've missed, and, through missing, brought to me?”

“Needn't I atone?” he asks, the question laden with the taste of metal poisons.

Silna's eyes burn. Into Goodsir, she exhales air damp and hot with the smell of the meat she has last eaten, thinking to him, “Needn't we two do so together? Aren't you lonely, too? If it would be what you want...then stay.” Were she to touch him, she is afraid that she'd find an inability to do so; that she would encounter only emptiness were she to dare try. Her hand presses flat to the furs beneath them until she can feel the rigid curves of ribs under the sleeping rugs. “Won't you please stay?”

He inhales this breath she gives him in silence and speaks with silence as well, promising to remain with her for as long as he can. Promising to assist her, should she ever have need. Silna realizes that she can feel the coarse brush of Goodsir's whiskers on her bare face as they share respiration, the tickle of his hair where curls of it float against her cheek and forehead, and then his forehead presses gently against hers, his eyes shutting, and Silna finds her own eyes sliding shut as well.

She wakes up alone to the sunlight.

**Author's Note:**

> Quick Inuktitut Glossary
> 
> -a'nuraaq: article of clothing  
> -Agluukkaq: Aglooka  
> -aŋatkuq: shaman  
> -anaana: mother  
> -anirniq: breath  
> -Aivilik: Aivilik area  
> -ataata: father  
> -hila: air; weather  
> -igalaaq: window  
> -igliq: bed  
> -iglu: igloo  
> -inukšuk: stone beacon  
> -inuviniq: former person  
> -iqaluk: fish  
> -natsiq: seal  
> -natsiviniq: former seal; seal meat  
> -Nuliajuk: Sedna (Sanna)  
> -qablunaaq: white person  
> -qamutiik: two sled runners; a sled  
> -qaumaniq: shamanic/spiritual light  
> -Qikiqtaq: island; King William Island  
> -Qikiqtarmiut: inhabitants of the island; People of Qikiqtaq  
> -tarniq: soul  
> -tuktu: caribou  
> -tuurŋaq: spirit  
> -umiaq: boat  
> 


End file.
